The AI could take the style of one image, like the swirls and dots of Vincent van Gogh's most famous painting "Starry Night" and make another image adopt this style, like a very sophisticated photo filter.

The altered photo of the river looks as though van Gogh was standing at the banks of the Neckar river instead of at his window in Saint Remy de Provence, the original setting for "Starry Night." Gatys wrote that the system gives us a mathematical basis for understanding how humans perceive and create art, especially because it mimics biological vision and the human brain.

The AI is made of stacked layers of computing units that imitates the interconnected structure of neurons, called a convolutional neural network (CNN). The scientists had to first "train" the system to recognize the features of famous paintings. The graph below shows how the AI comprehended the features of "Starry Night" and changed the photo of the river based on this knowledge.

Using Picasso's characteristic sharp angles and muted colors, the AI transformed the photo of a quiet riverfront into a stark, dystopian painting. This kind of photo transformation is called "non-photorealistic rendering."

The AI's parameters could also be changed to emphasize or understate the effect of the painting's style. This graph shows what the rendered images would look like at different levels of intensity. The top right rendering would be if Kandinsky's painting filter was at a very low setting, while the bottom left image shows the effect at a very high setting.

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